Alice in Wonderland: Full of Girl-Power Feminism

At last, we have an Alice in Wonderland for these times: Gloria Steinem meets Joan of Arc — with a touch of Carrie Bradshaw.

Tim Burton’s big-budget movie loses touch with a lot of the whimsy from Lewis Carroll’s Alice books in favor of lots of girl-power feminism. That doesn’t ruin the movie, but in a world that’s supposed to grow curioser and curioser, things quickly get conventional and conventionaler.

Alice (newcomer Mia Wasikowska) is the headstrong daughter of an English businessman, now deceased. At 19, she is a proto-feminist who refuses to wear a corset (“Who’s to say what’s proper?”) to a splendid garden gala that, she discovers with a shudder, is her own engagement party. She is facing the public humiliation of being asked for her hand in marriage by a dim and chinless aristocrat. “You know what I’ve always dreaded?” her prospective mother-in-law asks her. “The decline of the aristocracy?” Alices replies. We’re only minutes into the film, and already the script has established that Alice is exactly how the girls and women in the audience see themselves: modern, free-thinking, populist.

How rebellious is this film? It is surely the first one in history to be rated “PG for fantasy/action violence involving scary images and situations, and for a smoking caterpillar.” A movie that arrives in an age when our children must be warned that a mythical creature might smoke is likely to be wary of taking chances.

It is, though much of it is wonderful to behold. After Alice’s trip down the rabbit hole to the animated “Underland,” as it is called here, she is confronted with a garden of unearthy delights. The Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) has an enormous head of red hair balanced on a tiny body; her henchmen look like the spawn of playing cards and Iron Men. Tweedledee and Tweedledum are wittily drawn Charles Addams-like creations, and both Alan Rickman’s Blue Caterpillar and the Cheshire Cat (voiced by Stephen Fry) are delightfully droll.

Yet the film is little more than a parade of fantastical beings and set pieces in which the Red Queen’s leading soldier the Knave of Hearts (Crispin Glover) chases after the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp). These scenes, while often frantic, aren’t really scary and they aren’t really comedy, which brings up a problem with Depp, and with Burton.

Depp is a gifted actor but he isn’t a comedian. With the exception of his Keith Richards impression in the first Pirates movie, he’s never been funny. When he tries to get laughs, he simply comes out weird — like a lonely uncle who has never had children putting on a clown suit and trying too hard to be wacky. Depp’s busy but tiresome performance as the Hatter is as hard to watch as his bizarre Willy Wonka.

Moreover, as well-designed as the animation is, the movie lacks drive. Some scenes seem designed only to allow us to sit back and marvel, but the beasts become less and less interesting the second and third time they appear. Alice strolls around in wildly colorful outfits reminiscent of Carrie Bradshaw’s wardrobe on Sex and the City, as though the wonderland she’s really interested in is a sample sale.

Toward the end, the movie eventually gains a sense of purpose: Alice, who early on has been attacked by the vicious hellcat the Bandersnatch, must make peace with it, find the Vorpal sword, and, as the chosen champion of the Red Queen’s gentle sister the White Queen (Anne Hathaway), slay the even scarier Jabberwock. Clad in Joan of Arc armor, Alice rides into battle while in the background CGI effects show a Lord of the Rings-style clash of thousands of soldiers fighting on the Red and White sides.

This epic fight, though, seems perfunctory and it isn’t especially gripping. Alice, unlike Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, never really seems to be in much peril or to have a purpose other than to meet the next fantasy figure. Her trip to Underland seems like a day at a theme park rather than a true test of her mettle. The Red Queen, meanwhile, simply seems goofy, and borderline incompetent, rather than a master of evil like the Wicked Witch of the West. The major revelation — that Alice has been to Underland before — isn’t surprising, nor does it change anything important, and since Alice is essentially the same willful person at the beginning of the movie as she is when she returns to the real world at the end, her journey doesn’t matter much.

Of course, that could have been fixed if Underland had actually changed Alice into a feisty, combative, confident young woman. But that would mean the first act of the movie would have had to show Alice being both a credible heroine the audience could sympathize with and a proper, demure, passive Victorian lady. Apparently, even to spend ten minutes defending Victorian values is too fantastic an idea for today’s Hollywood to contemplate.

John Boot is the pen name of a conservative writer operating under deep cover in the liberal media.

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1.
RickGreenvilleSC

A little Johnny Depp goes a looong way. . . .sounds like another film to skip. . . .I would rather watch “Signs” again, or maybe the classic “Best Years of Our Lives”, or “Open Range”, . . . etc.

I’d like to see a movie where the aristocratic heroine works accepts her role within the system and makes it work to her advantage. There’s a difference between establishing one’s identity and destroying the framework of everyone else’s.

I always love it when contemporary film makers do a period piece and think they are shocking the hell out of us when the heroine is “modern, free-thinking, headstrong and a proto-feminist.” I think that Rachel McAdams used that exact line to describe her Irene Adler character in the recent “Sherlock Holmes.” And we all remember Kate Winslet’s feisty class-busting Picasso-collecting friend-to-poor-artists schtick in “Titanic.” For the last quarter century evry female lead from Maid Marion to your average Jane Austen heroine has been played as a butt-kicking, wise-cracking testicle-crushing combination of Germaine Greer and Xena, Warrior Princess. In the case of “Alice” its fair to remember that Tim Burton has always had problems creating credible grown-up male figures (so does Johnny Depp) and is far more comfortable with modernist post-pubescent female characters. That’s his privilege and good luck to him but Burton’s world-view is starting to get a little old.

Look, movies today are made to attract an audience…young women and girls especially, are that target audience. That movies continue to show female characters in this light, even when period pieces or fantasies, such as this one, is hardly surprising. A movie is made to MAKE MONEY and if an audience of young “modern” women cannot relate to the female character somehow…it will BOMB, as sure as Johnny Depp is weird and not funny!

You didn’t even mention the movie being shot in 2-D, then being converted to 3-D. Another marketing ploy, but one that falls a little flat on the heels of the spectacular effects in “Avatar”.

But you do what you gotta do to bring people in…and this unexceptional movie is hardly the exception here, either. I do think it will make a boat load of money though…especially in it’s first weekend!

Dave II is the voice of reason on this. I wish people would stop searching for “monster feminists taking over the world by crushing testicles” in everything. Jeez. I don’t believe that little boys will be damaged by these types of things, any more than little girls are damaged by the “some day my prince will come in” early flicks or Barbie. Unless their parents tell them it’s so. You gotta really want to believe this stuff.

I just saw Alice in Wonderland last night! It was…. well, I don’t want to spoil it for anyone =D You should have seen the lines! But it was so worth it. And everyone, and I mean EVERYONE was decked out in Alice gear, from Mad Hatter hats to Alice dresses to really cool Alice in Wonderland t-shirts. I went to my local radio station site and you can actually win some really cool Alice goodies like t-shirts I saw last night, nail polish, and awesome posters. Check it out!

Carter as the Red Queen was soooo miscast that I would never think to watch this farce. Had the person who casted this film known anything about the flavor of the real story they would have chosen Kathy Bates, hands down. And that’s just for starters. They took a classic children’s tale and morphed it into Hollywood hip. Another failed attempt. Johnny Depp looks like a jackass as well.

I think that this feminist business is just something that they are trying to put in a women’s brain. No offence I don’t say that they shouldn’t do what they want to do, but come on! all this nonsense is causing women to rebel against men (how funny that sounds!) saying that they are superior and more gifted then men. We both have rights, but don’t get too happy. By the way the Alice movie wasn’t what I was expecting. Everything seems to revolve only at Alice and not the actual environment she is in…so much for the title alice in WONDERLAND.

“but come on! all this nonsense is causing women to rebel against men (how funny that sounds!)” Please elaborate what you mean. Stripping a human being of their human rights based on their “gender,” is certainly a “rebellion” against nature itself. Yet, it is done. I do not believe it was the women who started this “rebellion,” you speak of.

“Everything seems to revolve only at Alice and not the actual environment she is in”

Ever heard of the bechdel test? A system that proves movies tend to focus strictly upon the male-perspective. Looks like you’re suffering the bruises of doing something backwards for a change. lol

I guess my whole point here is… I thought the movie was GREAT! There’s no battle of the sexes going on… just people living their thoughts and ideas… why engender them? Unless your ideals is that women should be “soft, squishy, and air-head.” Uninteresting enough to focus more on the “environment” whilst other movies focus more on the “heroes” etc? Weird.

I don’t believe the “feminist business” is something invented by the media (it is a legit, scholarly matter.) I just think you can’t see the double-standards from your “comfy” perspective.